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Synopsis

Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors by Helen Epstein (123,000 words; with a 30th anniversary preface by the author)

A blend of memoir, reportage and oral history, Children of the Holocaust was one of the first books to examine the inter-generational transmission of trauma. In a starred review Publishers Weekly wrote: “Charts new and sensitive territory as it provides important insights into the long-term effects of the Holocaust on those who survived and the ways their trauma shaped the lives of the next generation. Epstein’s courageous, dogged probing of the past is beautifully written, but it is the discoveries she makes and the process of uncovering them that informs her words, that makes the soundings so deep, so human, so haunting.”

Originally published in 1979, it had never gone out of print and has been widely translated and anthologized. The eBook, published in 2010, includes a new preface and an updated bibliography.

The sequel to Children of the Holocaust, a family and social history of Central European Jews, is Where She Came From.